Our Collective’s Commitments
Inspired by the work of Dr. L.B Klein and the GLITTER Lab
The [Sexuality | Relationships | Gender] Research Collective Lab is committed to the practice of slow scholarship. Everything we do is important – nothing we do is *urgent*. We choose to move at the speed of care. This means we value community, connection, healing, rest, and care of the self over traditional measures of productivity and the pressure to speed up knowledge production based on cis het white supremacist and ableist notions of time and labor.
We value thoughtfulness, depth, and process over speed, volume, and performance. While timely dissemination of our work is critical to the communities we serve, our research, and community partners, we believe that we can do this through reflection, rigor, and relational ethics. This allows the time and space to think critically, engage more deeply with ideas, and honor all of the collective labor that makes our research feasible. This is a slow scholarship framework that allows us to fully show up for one another, our work, and our community(ies) and not at the expense of our bodyminds or trust.
To protect the integrity of our shared learning, the privacy of our participants, the safety of those hired to remove violent data from AI data bases to protect Western AI users, and the sustainability of our planet, we do not use any generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc.) for the conceptualizing, analysis, writing, or editing of the SRG Collective’s research products. There are many ways to innovate and create; we actively choose NOT to adopt these technologies, and rather, to use the brilliant technologies of our bodyminds, connected with one another both virtually and in person, as we move at the speed of care.
We choose NOT use generative AI in the SRG Collective because:
- The Environmental and Community Impact – As critical and community led scholars, we must consider how our scholarly processes impact people and the planet. Large language models consume vast amounts of water and energy, and the development of these technologies can be devastating to the humans who create and maintain them. As a collective embedded in social work and grounded in critical praxis, we are committed to social and environmental justice.
- Critical Thinking and Learning – Although we value disseminating our scholarship in a timely manner, critical knowledge-building is not efficient by design. Our goal is not to move as quickly as possible but to move with intention and in alignment with our values, and those of the communities we represent. AI tools are inherently biased, have political underpinnings, often replace inquiry with imitation (and hallucinations), and can be both exploitative of other thinkers. Additionally, generative AI is often reductive in its focus on the aggregate and often most palatable (read: white, masculine, cis het, non-disabled, neurodivergent, Western) voices and experiences.
- Intellectual, Community, and Ethical Integrity – Critical community led research is not a linear process. Slow scholarship and moving at the speed of care involves iterative processes of thinking, reading, writing, and analyzing. We must engage, immerse, marinate, consult, share, circle back, and so on, often multiple times. These skills are all essential to scholarly development and AI can undermine our ability to consider complexity, develop our voices as writers, and build analytic confidence, as well as disrupt and limit the ways we engage our community(ies) in our work.
Members are welcome to use generative (and other) AI tools in their personal, professional, and academic lives outside of their work with the Collective – one does not need to fully agree with this perspective/stance in order to engage as a member. However, NO conceptualization, analysis, writing (including proposal development, manuscript writing, presentation creation, etc.), or editing connected to the SRG Research Collective will involve the use of generative AI.
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